Innovation

By Michael Taylor

In college I immersed myself in the ethic of outdoor experiential education. One of many inspiring readings from Outward Bound that I’ve kept for the last fifteen years is a short quotation from Woodrow Wilson Sayre’s book Four Against Everest. Sayre, who as a middle-aged philosophy professor in Boston decided to become part of the first American team to summit Mt. Everest, wrote:

"The truth is that part of the essence of mountain climbing is to push oneself to one’s limits. Inevitably this involves risk, otherwise they would not be one’s limits. This is not to say that you deliberately try something you know you can’t do. But you do deliberately try something which you are not sure you can do."

Innovation at Cedarcrest has been that way from the beginning, and it’s felt a bit like high-altitude climbing at times. We’re not doing anything impossible - but we are frequently doing something we’ve never attempted before, and that I’m not sure we can do.

Looking back on Cedarcrest’s first three years, I see I improvised and innovated from the beginning. In fact, before the beginning. At the very first industry conference I attended, before I’d even “quit my day job” and launched Cedarcrest, I met a man named Maurice who changed the direction of my business.

Maurice, a chain-smoking 75-year old high-school dropout, was an unlikely guru to me, a Wall Street bond salesman fixing to launch my new finance company. But I now know that the half-hour coffee break with Maurice dramatically changed the direction of Cedarcrest. Like a guide to my entrepreneurial mountain-climb, he described a few seldom-followed paths to building wealth. In the months following that fortuitous meeting, I set out to try his suggested paths, unsure of what I would discover. Those innovations suggested by Maurice now form a core part of the Cedarcrest business.

Susan writes about innovative marketing techniques because of her unique location in rural New Hampshire. She’s writing a blog, arranging meet-ups between symbiotic groups, and wooing European partners in cyberspace. Definitely not your grandmother’s tried-and-true Yellow Pages techniques.

Now, marketing is not the same as climbing Everest, but it does require the willingness to try new things. When I started Cedarcrest I had no idea that marketing our services would be a constant uphill journey requiring untried techniques all along the way.

I think about our new marketing efforts in the past year:

1. Attending a Trade Show as a participant
2. Attending a Trade Show as a vender with a Booth (twice)
3. Networking over Breakfast with professional networking groups
4. Participating in panelist discussions
5. Writing articles in trade magazines
6. Writing articles on-line
7. Sending direct-mail to potential customers
8. Advertising in magazines
9. Posting free banner ads on industry websites
10. Posting paid banner ads on industry websites

The marketing mountain we’re climbing goes endlessly upwards, and the trail is not exactly clearly marked. We’re trying new methods without knowing in advance whether it will work because I don’t know anyone who has built a company like mine.

From the beginning, innovation at Cedarcrest has been a combination of

A) being open to suggestions from unlikely guides like Maurice, as well as
B) Trying new techniques that I’m not sure about in advance.

As a small-business owner, this is the joy of the journey.

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April 17, 2007 12:53 PM